How to Paint Cute & Simple Animals Using Watercolor Paint

Let's learn watercolor painting by creating cute animals! This class is great for beginner or intermediate artists. Even more advanced painters can benefit from the weekly practice of creating multiple small paintings. This will be a fun, low-stress class that's wonderful for summer.

In this class, students will learn pivotal watercolor skills by creating small paintings of simple animals. Each week we'll practice wet on wet, wet on dry, detail brush strokes. pulling, lifting, and more. We'll create multiple quick paintings step by step since we'll need layers to dry as we go. This type of iterative process is an effective way to learn, as students can quickly see how they might like to improve on the next small painting. This also helps to combat the overwhelm of feeling the need to create a huge, complicated piece. Even different colors can be used on each painting (for example, one cat is black with a red background and the next cat is orange with a blue background). We'll also work at combatting perfectionism, which is something I try to include regularly in my teaching. Happy accidents are expected and embraced as we let the watercolor paints "do their thing" and spread in often unpredictable ways. 

Each week, we'll begin with warm-up painting strokes on a practice page. Then I'll remind (or teach for the first time;) some best practices for watercolors, such as spraying their palette before painting and having a test piece of paper for checking colors and water vs. paint proportions on the brush, etc. It's surprising how helpful this kind of information can be.

One of the things I love about art is how interaction is built into the teaching process. As I talk, students are free to try out what I'm teaching in real-time. I will be open to questions, comments, and discussions periodically as we go along in each class time. It's so fun for everyone to share their art, if they're comfortable and to share "wins" or funny things that happen in the painting during the process.